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Did you make a mistake working in BigLaw? Why?
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I think there’s a lot of space between biglaw and med school if your goal is to make a more positive impact on people’s lives. You could, for example, go into public interest work. And I’d be careful about romanticizing medicine. Putting aside how extremely long and expensive the path is, doctors also have very high rates of burnout, despite (or maybe even *because of*), the fact that they’re often saving lives.
I dropped out of med school and am now an attorney. A lot of the doctors I know love helping people, but also feel that their patients are consistently constrained by the legal system, insurance, finances, inequity, etc.
There is a LOT of good you can do with a law degree. You just won’t get paid as much.
As an aside, assuming you have already taken all the prereqs (big assumption) you couldn’t pay me to take the MCAT again. Truly the most miserable experience of my entire life.
I think it is ironic that you mention a prestige rabbit hole and then immediately bring up medicine. You should talk to other doctors before you consider it. Also if it’s really about saving lives, would you be a paramedic or nurse?
Also if by prestige rabbit hole you mean being sick of people who over prioritize prestige, again, medicine would be an ironic field to lateral to. This is cream of the crop. They’re on average smarter and better credentialed than lawyers, more type A, there are prestige dickfights over the medical school you go to, the field you specialize in, the residency you score, the money you make, etc etc. A disconcerting number of doctors don’t really care about the impact and only care about the money and prestige. Like it’s very much out of the frying pan and into the fire.
You should shadow a physician and see what it’s like. My brother is a surgical resident and my dad was a ENT pediatric surgeon. If you want to make immediate impact, surgery is fulfilling from what they told me. I’m not a blood/operating type of person and I know that about myself. But you need to ask yourself what kind of medicine you would/could practice? Insurance also highly dictates what you can and can’t do and that’s been an ongoing issue. So you don’t truly have as much agency as it looks like on the outside.
But the best part of my job is that no one’s life depends on it… I like knowing all of my emergencies are fake
Mentor
Same here, although it makes me sort of resent the people who do treat it like life or death even more since it’s so clearly not that important
Mentor
I think about this a lot. Lately my daydreaming is about what if I had become a pilot 🤷🏻♂️ seems much cooler than this
As someone whose brother is a doc, I can 100% tell you it’s a slog too and a lot less glamorous or fulfilling than it seems from the outside. The guy works as much as me too, at least right now
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